Pampalone, a senior at Tottenville HS, squeezed into the middle of the back seat.

“We didn’t even get there, it happened on the way,” Lenny Pampalone said.

While waiting at a red light on Hylan Boulevard, the five friends started flirting with a group of girls in a white Mitsubishi Galant that was stopped alongside them, hoping to pick them up.

The girls, older than the teens in the Bonneville, weren’t interested, and they let the boys know it.

They made sneering remarks about the teens’ football jackets, and they threw a cigarette butt into their car.

The boys retaliated by hurling dog biscuits into the Mitsubishi, and the girls responded by calling for backup -one of them got on her cellphone and dialed her brother, police said.

“Those girls were looking for trouble, and attention, when they called those boys,” said Lenny’s father, Leonard Pampalone Sr. “Boys will always try and pick up girls, that’s life. What’s the big deal?”

What happened minutes later is detailed in police reports.

The boys were stopped at another red light on Hylan Boulevard when three men in a black Pontiac Grand Prix pulled alongside them. One man got out and began smashing the rear window of the Bonneville with a baseball bat, the reports said.

“Lenny just put his head between his knees and prayed for it to be over soon,” the elder Pampalone said.

But the terrifying attack didn’t stop.

When the light changed, Cantarini gunned the engine, speeding along the boulevard to get away.

Two miles down the road, he ran a red light, clipped another car at Richmond Avenue, hit a utility pole and flipped his car onto its side at Lyndale Avenue.

Ingrassia, sitting in the back seat, was flung from the wreckage and killed.

Pampalone was found hunched over with his eyes tightly closed. EMS officers dragged his limp body from the twisted metal seconds before the car burst into flames.

The other boys had crawled out of the car. They were shouting, “Help my friend! They were chasing us!” a witness said. They escaped the crash with minor injuries, but traumatized.

Leonardo “was just a baby. It’s just senseless what happened, they are all such good kids,” Maria Pampalone said.

“This has left a scar on my son for life. This has scarred all of them for the rest of their lives.”

She said her son is not the funloving jokester he once was. He’s now sullen and fearful.

Her son is reluctant to discuss the tragedy. “It is still so fresh in my mind, I’m just trying to get over it,” he said.

“Things are so different now, nothing will be the same again.”

The search for the attackers ended Thursday with the arrest of two suspects.

Arben Selmani, a student at C.W. Post College, and Joseph Milrud, a student at St. John’s University, were charged with gang assault and menacing.

“I mean, what were they thinking? How could they be so stupid?” Pampalone Sr. said. “A young boy died because of their stupidity.”

“You know,” he sighed, “we could have been going to five funerals, not one.”